ABROAD AT HOME

ABROAD AT HOME; Out of This Nettle

By Anthony Lewis

Published: March 2, 1990

BOSTON—
What happened in Nicaragua this week was not just a remarkable election. It was a victory for a new approach to intractable conflicts, turning them from bloodshed to the democratic political process.

Three Presidents outside Nicaragua made it possible: Oscar Arias, Jimmy Carter and George Bush. Their leadership gave Nicaragua a way out of the nightmare of war and destitution. It gave the United States a way out of a shameful role in causing the devastation.

For eight years, under President Reagan, the United States ran a campaign of terror against Nicaragua. The Reagan Administration invented the contra army, advised it, supplied it. Though covered by various hypocrisies, Mr. Reagan's aim was never in doubt. He wanted to overthrow the Sandinista Government.

President Arias of Costa Rica opened a way out at the meeting of five Central American presidents at Esquipulas, Guatemala, in 1987. His peace plan, aimed at committing all in the region to non-intervention and free elections, was the basis of what eventually worked.

But there were enormous mutual suspicions to overcome first. Robert Pastor, who had been the Latin expert on President Carter's national security staff, explored them in his important 1987 book, ''Condemned to Repetition: The United States and Nicaragua.'' Washington saw revolutionaries who would invite the Soviet Union into the region, the Sandinistas expected the worst of the U.S. even before it came - and each side's fears reinforced the other's.

For more than a year after the Arias plan was put forward, President Reagan resisted it though Congress responded. Then, just a year ago, President Bush changed the policy. In agreement with Congress, he decided to support the idea of peace through new elections in Nicaragua.

But the Sandinistas still had to be persuaded to go through the process faithfully, even to the point of accepting defeat if it came. Here President Carter made his crucial contribution.

Over a period of seven months, Mr. Carter built up a relationship of trust with President Daniel Ortega. When Mr. Ortega took a step toward free elections, Mr. Carter praised him. That was a notable change from the Reagan years, when Mr. Ortega was abused for whatever he did.

President Carter headed one of several teams of international observers. But what he did was a transforming advance in the observer role.

The traditional observer function is to say whether an election was honest. Mr. Carter did that in Panama last May, when he said convincingly that General Noriega's claim of victory was fraudulent. In Nicaragua, he hoped to do something more difficult and more important: to persuade both sides to accept the result.

The moment of truth came at midnight election night, when Mr. Carter met with Mr. Ortega. Both knew that Violeta Chamorro had won, but Mr. Ortega had not conceded defeat.

''I've won a Presidential election and I've lost a Presidential election,'' Mr. Carter said. ''It's not the end of the world.''

Mr. Ortega said he would accept the result, but he wanted assurance that the winners would not humiliate or persecute his people. Mr. Carter went to see Mrs. Chamorro, and soon winner and loser made gracious speeches. Mr. Carter stayed on and helped to work out transition understandings.

Why did Mr. Ortega accept the result? There was more to it, surely, than the personal relationship with Jimmy Carter, important as that was. People who were there said the campaign itself had an impact. It changed the Sandinistas' concept of themselves, from a Marxist to a more democratic one.

The events in Nicaragua, then, are fresh testimony to the power of Jefferson's idea: government with the consent of the governed, as Vaclav Havel reminded us the other day. To say so seems romantic, but then we live in a romantic age.

Some Americans will wonder how much our brutal policies of recent years helped to produce the election result Washington wanted. The economic distress that no doubt moved some Nicaraguans to vote for Mrs. Chamorro was caused in part, after all, by U.S. sanctions. (Other Nicaraguans voted against Mrs. Chamorro because of the contra war.) But the short of it is that the Reagan policy did not work. It produced only misery, death and shame. The experiment in peace and democracy did work.

President Bush was not just lucky in this case. He took the political risk of offending right-wing zealots. He was not threatened by the role of Mr. Carter and others. Now, by being generous, he can further abate the legacy of suspicion between the United States and Nicaragua.